


After All

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Future Fic, Gen, Kid Fic, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Being a magical fairy-gift whose whole existence is a demonstration of the supernatural amazingness of your fathers' love story ought to be a good thing.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	After All

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to riverlight for beta, and to Iulia for reasons.
> 
> This story takes its title and most of its narrative from the Dar Williams song "After All."
> 
> Written for my hc_bingo wildcard (depression). Mind the tags!

Being a magical fairy-gift whose whole existence is a demonstration of the supernatural amazingness of your fathers' love story ought to be a good thing. Lina spends a lot of time tangled up in that thought and the way it isn't true and the guilt she feels for thinking it. She spends even more time wondering if she's a changeling and not her fathers' magical daughter at all, or if there was an evil fairy in there somewhere who secretly cursed Daddy and Dad by giving them Lina instead of a little girl who could be happy with her happy life.

Lina doesn't have anything to be sad about. She has a big pack and two fathers who love her and each other. She has a bedroom they paint a new color every year and toys and books and a big backyard and a pool. She's not even sad most of the time, really. She doesn't sleep much during the winter she's eight years old, and in the dark she thinks a lot of nighttime thoughts about what a wrong thing she is and how much better it would be if the fairies made her not ever have existed at all. 

But when she's with Daddy she smiles and talks about school and the books she reads. She's a werewolf like Daddy is, and she knows how to make him believe her. It's harder, sometimes, to lie to Dad. He looks more closely, because he can't just sniff her and listen to the beat of her heart. But she knows how Dad works, too. She knows just how to distract him from the things she doesn't want to talk about, and anyway Dad works a lot, chasing down bad guys. When Daddy says she's fine, Dad believes him.

After the winter when she's eight, Lina starts sleeping again, and doesn't have to work so hard to hide herself from Daddy and Dad. It still crosses her mind sometimes that she's a changeling, a curse, a mistake. It's just something she knows. The shadow of it passes over her sometimes, but most of the time it moves on before too long.

Lina is fifteen the first time she thinks that if no fairy is going to come along and fix the mistake that she is, she could still fix it herself. She flexes her claws idly, thinks of the way humans do it, but that's no good. She knows she'd heal too fast to do it that way. Daddy would smell the blood as soon as she broke her own skin; even if she didn't heal, Daddy would stop her and bandage her up before she could do it that way. 

There's wolfsbane, but that would hurt too much, and take too long. The thought of the long death of suffocation or poisoning is awful, and not what she wants at all. She doesn't want to draw out the dying. The whole point is that she's tired of suffering and she doesn't want to do it anymore.

She could jump, though. There's the highway bridge they go over on the way to the mall. That might be high enough, but there would be cars going by the whole time, and Lina wouldn't want anyone to see. 

The lookout cliff would be better, high up in the woods outside of town. She's been there dozens of times with Daddy, with Uncle Scott and the whole pack. She could run there blindfolded. It would be so easy, so quick, to slip and fall all the way to the bottom-- _splat_. And then no more Lina, with guilty wrong blankness in her where she should be happy. No more Lina hating how her whole life is compressed into the exclamation point on her fathers' _happily ever after_. No more Lina lying awake. No more Lina.

She feels a little better when she has a plan, and after that she even falls asleep. 

The thought comes back to her again and again. She starts running alone in the woods, where she doesn't have to smile and lie, and she doesn't have to pretend she's not thinking about it. She doesn't go to the cliff, because it's not time yet. It's enough to know that the cliff is there, that when she can't bear existing anymore, she'll know where to go. 

In the meantime she keeps her heartbeat steady for Daddy and chatters for Dad. She gets good grades and breaks records at her cross-country meets whenever Dad's random number generator says she's allowed to. She's going to ace the PSAT, and then sometime after that, she's going to jump. She's going to wear a beautiful dress to the winter formal, take pretty pictures with Daddy and Dad beforehand, and sometime after that, she's going to jump. She carries around her secret silent curse, stares at it on her bedroom ceiling on the nights when she doesn't sleep. She tells it, _you think you're going to win, but I know how to get away from you_.

In the springtime, when her sixteenth birthday is coming and her fathers are teasing her and each other about birthday presents, about cakes and cars and jewelry and wild parties with spiked punch, the darkness gets worse. Even on warm days, Lina feels a coldness hanging around her. The sun doesn't seem to get through, and all her senses seem muted, the way colors disappear in the dark, leaving just shapes and outlines. 

Late on a new moon night she decides she's had enough. She listens a while to Daddy and Dad's heartbeats, side by side in the bed down the hall. All her life she's heard them together, filling in each other's silences, fitting together like they were made to fit each other, just like she was made for them. When she can't stay to listen anymore, she slips quietly outside and runs.

She doesn't go to the very edge of the cliff right away. She stands and looks at the lights of Beacon Hills down below her, at the dark place on the edge of town where her fathers are still sleeping. She picks out the homes of every member of her pack, Grandpa and Grandma's house, her school. She's not sure if she's saying goodbye or just stalling. She looks up at the sky, so dark and clear that she can make out the whole shape of the Milky Way against the darkness. 

It's cold up on the cliff--not the numb chill of her curse but actually cold, a crisp biting wind that batters at her skin. Lina shivers and wishes for a jacket and then thinks that she's not going to need a jacket ever again. She's going to jump.

She walks to the edge and looks down. She thinks about falling, about spending her last few seconds feeling weightless, and the wind whistling by her. She thinks about the nothing that there will be after: no more sleepless nights, no more pretending to be happy. No more lying. No more wondering what's wrong with her, why she can't be normal, why she can't be the perfect magical girl she was born to be. No more worrying.

And then she thinks about Daddy finding her there, smashed to pieces at the bottom of the cliff. She thinks about Dad in his uniform, taping off the scene. She thinks about her pack gathering without her on the wolf moon and on Samhain, and saying her name along with all the other names she's been hearing them recite since she was a little kid: the ones who died in the fire and in the bad times. If she'd been around then, she'd at least understand why she was sad all the time. Daddy gets sad sometimes, remembering them, and that makes sense. It's just Lina who's sad for no reason.

But after she jumps, Daddy will be sad, and Dad will be sad. What if they never stop being sad about her? Lina remembers suddenly reading a statistic somewhere, about how often couples break up after a child dies. What if she ruins them? What kind of end is that for their magical love story, their fairy-gift daughter dead at the bottom of a cliff? What if one of them made some crazy deal with the fairies after all that to bring her back? What if one of _them_ died, and that twinned heartbeat she's been listening to every night for her whole life was suddenly just a half?

She can't do it, Lina realizes, standing there. She can't jump. She can't die. She would hurt them too much, hurt her pack too much. She'll have to live, somehow. She'll have to just go on being an evil fairy's changeling. 

She sits down right there at the edge as the tears fill her eyes, and she's too tired to even think about the long cold walk back home. She's going to have to sit at breakfast and smile and lie. She's going to have to keep smiling and keep lying forever, keep pretending that she fits into the fairy tale of her fathers' lives.

And then she hears them. Racing fast with exertion and worry, she hears her fathers' heartbeats twining together like always as they come through the trees behind her. That's when she starts to sob, when she knows they're going to find her. They're going to know what she's tried to do and all the effort of lying will be for nothing. She'll have to try to explain to them what she is, what's wrong with her, when there's really nothing wrong, nothing for her to be sad about. They'll feel bad, and maybe fight about whose fault it is, and she'll ruin their love story anyway, even without jumping. 

The sobs shake her like a storm, like dishes breaking in the center of her chest. It goes on and on until the fury fades into a dull, heavy ache, weighing down her limbs and her head. That's when she notices that Dad and Daddy are sitting right behind her, close enough for her to feel their body heat, close enough for them to catch her if she started to fall. She sits there looking over the edge for a while, thinks about making them do it--making them pull her back. But she isn't going to jump, and she isn't going to pretend to fall, so sooner or later she has to move.

She scoots back, just enough that her back is against their folded legs. As soon as she makes contact their arms go around her, hauling her the rest of the way onto solid ground. Lina gets pulled right into Daddy's lap, and Dad leans against her on the other side, the two of them surrounding her in warmth and the smell of home. They press together around her like they can fit her right inside them and make her safe, the way she used to lie between them in their bed during storms when she was tiny. Lina keeps her eyes shut and curls down small between them, clenching her teeth against words or more sobs.

There's a long silence while everyone's heartbeats settle down, and Lina thinks Daddy and Dad are looking at each other, having one of those silent conversations they have (Daddy mostly just uses his eyebrows, but Dad's whole face gets into it). After a long, long time it's Dad who speaks.

"Do you know what happened to me when I was your age, baby?"

Lina sniffles, thinking. 

"You met Daddy," she says, because she's almost sixteen. "And it was the start of a beautiful everything."

She feels Daddy laugh a little, and Dad says, "Yeah, I'm thinking we didn't do you any favors by telling you the Disney version. You're getting the unabridged Grimm's over breakfast, okay, because when I met your Daddy it was mostly the start of a few years of incredible terror and agony, and also he was kind of a jerk."

"I was a jerk," Daddy says, in that flat way he does when he's mostly only pretending to be mad. "You wanted to leave me for dead and I was a jerk."

"I'm not saying I wasn't," Dad says, "but, look, Lina, we'll get into that whole thing later."

Lina picks her head and looks back and forth from Daddy to Dad. They're gray in the darkness, and they look tired and old and strange somehow. She always knew they didn't tell her everything about the bad times when Erica and Boyd and Aunt Laura and Uncle Peter died, but they were always _on the same side_ , that was the whole point. "You--you were going to leave Daddy to _die_?"

"I was probably a worse jerk," Dad says quickly, tucking her head back down to his shoulder, and Lina closes her eyes and lets him. "But that happened after I turned sixteen, which is not what I'm talking about. Do you know what happened when I was fifteen?"

Lina shakes her head against his chest. Nothing happened when Dad was fifteen, that she knows about. Grandma Claudia died when Dad was nine, and Dad met Uncle Scott when he was thirteen. Fifteen is just... the year before sixteen, when Dad and Uncle Scott met Daddy and found out about werewolves and stepped into a story with a happy ending. 

"When I was fifteen," Dad says, "the summer after freshman year, nothing happened. Nothing at all happened to me, things were going fine, but I don't think I slept all the way through one single night. Anxiety was always more my thing--I had panic attacks after my mom died, that at least I could figure out, and later on, after all the shit started hitting the fan, I was scared for totally rational reasons. But that summer I was just losing my shit for no reason at all--racing thoughts, nightmares, insomnia, everything. I didn't tell my dad, but I'm pretty sure he knew something was up. Except nothing _was_ up. I was just scared all the time."

"I thought a lot about dying when I was fifteen," Daddy says. "I'd already made some really bad choices by then, and I thought--I could escape. Or I deserved it. Or at least it would be over. But I couldn't bring myself to do it."

"We actually joked," Dad says. "When we first got together, we were comparing stories, and we said it was such a good thing we were both guys, because if we actually made a baby with our genes, that poor kid would be depressed and anxiety-ridden and hyperactive and way too smart for her own good, and she'd never ever be happy."

"And then you happened," Daddy says. "And you were perfect like every baby is perfect. But you're still ours, and we still passed on all of our worst tendencies, and they've been hitting you hard this year."

Lina's shoulders shake, crammed in between Daddy and Dad's chests, and she realizes she's crying again, when she didn't think there was anything left in her at all. But her fathers already knowing-- _understanding_ \--is somehow worse than having to tell. 

"But I--I'm not--but everything is fine," she whispers. She doesn't even know why she's arguing with them, except that she can't believe it can be that easy, or that her own fathers were the dark fairies who made her this way. 

"Everything's not fine," Dad says. "You wouldn't be standing at the top of a cliff in the middle of the night if everything was fine. But everything will be fine. You're gonna go see a doctor, and you're gonna get better."

"And we love you whether you get better or not," Daddy says. "It's okay if you feel like this even if you don't know why. Just don't jump. Everything else, we can handle. It's okay."

"I'm sorry," Lina whispers, because it's not okay at all. "I'm sorry I--I'm sorry I ruined it."

"Ruined what," Dad says. "Ruined our night's sleep? We weren't sleeping anyway, we haven't been sleeping for months. Ruined Tuesday? Fuck Tuesday, I hate Tuesdays, you cannot possibly ruin a Tuesday."

Lina shook her head. "Ruined--you. Your story. Everything's okay now, and I'm supposed to be the little cherry on top, not--not--"

"Oh, baby," Dad says. "That's just our story. You've got your own story to think about now, and you haven't even gotten started yet."

"Also," Daddy says, "for the record, the actual story of the two of us is a long string of disasters that didn't quite destroy us, so you fit right in. Coming up here to find you was just like the old days."

Lina laughs a little at that, even though it's not funny. She's realizing for the first time that the bad times weren't just this thing that happened a long time ago in a story that's over. They happened to people not much older than her, and maybe they felt like this while they were happening. They probably made more sense than this. But still--still. Maybe it's true. Maybe she fits right in.

"Oh, good," Dad says. "Look, everyone's still alive and the sun's coming up."

Lina picks her head up, leans her cheek against Daddy's shoulder, and watches with her eyes half open as the color leaks back into the world. She's warm here, and Daddy will carry her home if she says she's too tired to walk. She doesn't have to lie anymore. Maybe Dad's right and she can get better. Maybe she'll have a story of her own after all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [After All [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/969909) by [aethel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aethel/pseuds/aethel)




End file.
